“It is they who are the monsters—they with their mindless
prejudices!”
-Nightcrawler, Giant-Size X-Men #1 (1975)
In the mid-to-late 1960s, superhero comics began a concerted effort to achieve greater relevance. As Ramzi Fawaz describes, this turn toward relevance coincided with a general shift in the public perception of comics, spurred by both the Underground movement and the dawn of the Marvel Age; both the Undergrounds and the new Marvel superheroes attracted more teenagers and adults to the world of comics, and garnered positive mainstream media attention that would have been unimaginable during the 1950s. According to Fawaz:
Where little more than a decade earlier comics had signaled the moral and aesthetic degradation of American culture, by 1971 they had come of age as America’s “native art”: taught on Ivy League campuses, studied by
European scholars, artists, and filmmakers, and translated and sold around the world, they were now taken up as a new generation’s critique of American society… [I]n the early 1970s relevance became a popular buzzword denoting a shift in comic book content from oblique narrative metaphors for social problems toward direct representations of racism and sexism, political corruption, and urban blight. (126)
indirectly to a changed and changing cultural landscape; the threats of communism and nuclear annihilation were present in these comics, but generally in the fantastical form of radioactive mutations, shapeshifters, and planet-eating aliens. By the 1970s, however, superhero comics were commonly addressing contemporary politics more directly. Case in point, in 1971, Amazing Spider-Man #76 featured a story in which Peter Parker’s best friend Harry Osborn overdoses on pills; this comic was the first mainstream superhero comic in 17 years to be published without the Comic Book Code Seal of Approval.35 Also in 1971, DC Comics began publishing the critically acclaimed series Green Lantern Co-Starring Green Arrow, in which the title characters eschew traditional superheroics in favour of embarking on a quest to “find the real America.” Driving across the nation in a beat-up pickup truck, this superheroic odd couple encounters such hot button issues as corruption, pollution, cults, and overpopulation. And in 1974, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Captain America abandoned the stars and stripes for a new moniker, one that reflected a heretofore unimaginable loss of faith in American nationalism: “Nomad, the Man Without a Country.” Prompted by the social, political, and cultural upheavals of, in particular, Civil Rights and second-wave feminism, superhero comics from this era also began to engage race and gender conflicts more seriously and more comprehensively than ever before. This state of affairs was reflected at both Marvel and DC in the creation of several new black and female superheroes that were intended to resonate with the newly urgent demands for black and female empowerment.
This chapter will explore this era of relevance by examining Marvel’s attempts to use several newly created characters to incorporate racial, gender, and multicultural politics into its superhero universe. First, this chapter will consider comics featuring the first black superhero,
Marvel’s Black Panther, who was created in 1966 and starred in his first solo series beginning in 1973. This will be followed by an examination of a group of female superheroes created by Marvel during the 1970s, including the Cat, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and Spider-Woman. Lastly, this chapter will consider the deployment of multiculturalism in the X-Men franchise, which was reimagined in 1975 as a more explicit metaphor for the persecution of racial and other minorities. Letter pages and in-comic editorials suggest that all of the Black Panther, these new female superheroes, and the reimagined X-Men were intended, in part, to expand the superhero comics market by reaching out to a new, more diverse readership. Yet these new characters, almost all of whom were created by straight white men, also reflect mainstream sensibilities concerning race, gender, and multicultural politics. They also remain steeped in the conventions of the superhero genre, which has traditionally privileged a fairly narrow range of straight white male subjects. As discussed in Chapter One, Marvel’s white male superheroes most convincingly prove their (super)heroic masculinity and/or maleness by demonstrating their ability to revise it: to develop new (or at least seemingly new) ways and types of embodying still-mostly-traditional notions of (among other thing) gender and sex(uality); consequently, Marvel’s white male superheroes can be described as reaffirming traditional masculinity amid, and in response to, a new sense of vulnerability and visibility. Conversely, the new minority superheroes under examination in this chapter must assert control over a pre-existing vulnerability rooted in a pre-existing visibility. As Moira Gatens describes, Western culture has historically viewed non-male, non-white, non- straight, disabled, or otherwise “abnormal” bodies as possessing a “corporeal specificity marks them as inappropriate analogues to the political body” (23). Because such bodies “are not capable of the appropriate political forfeit,” they are “excluded from political and ethical
the semi-divine political body” (Gatens 24). This chapter will use the example of this era’s new minority superheroes to consider what it does or might mean to have minoritized bodies enact racialized and gendered spectacles without becoming spectacles—or, to put it another way, what it might mean to be and represent through and upon a minoritized body without becoming just a minoritized body.
While gender conflicts have always been either implicitly or explicitly visible within the superhero genre, for the first several decades of the genre’s existence, racial politics were either exaggeratedly obvious or disguised in metaphor. Before and during WWII and for nearly two decades afterwards, any non-white characters who appeared in mainstream superhero comics were generally bumbling, caricatured sidekicks (such as the Timely Comics’ character
“Whitewash”) or grotesque villains. Marvel continued to feature racially caricatured villains well into the 1960s. For instance, in Iron Man’s origin story in Tales of Suspense #39 (1963), he is pitted against “Wong-Chu, the red guerilla tyrant” (Image 1). Although Wong-Chu is rendered in a less grotesque fashion than many of the Japanese villains that filled the pages of superhero comics during World War II, this evil Vietnamese commander is nonetheless highly caricatured, from his cunning-but-cowardly personality to his buck teeth, exaggeratedly slanted eyes, and obviously yellow skin tone.36 Before 1966, black characters, in particular, were almost totally absent from the Marvel Universe.37 That year, both the Black Panther,38 the world’s first black
36 It is worth noting that this story also features a heroic Asian character, in the form of Professor Yinsen, a fellow
prisoner of the communists who helps Tony Stark build his Iron Man armor. However, Yinsen is also highly stereotypical: he is the racialized “helper figure” who gladly sacrifices his life so that the more important white hero may live.
37 Between 1961 and 1966, the Marvel Universe featured only one recurring black character: Gabriel Jones, in the
title Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos (1963-1981). Importantly, though, this title eschewed
contemporary politics by being set comfortably in the past, during WWII. Jones, the only black member of an eight-person team, also played a minor role; when the title’s lead character, Nick Fury, was translated into the contemporary continuity to head up the Man from U.N.C.L.E.-inspired Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division (a.k.a. S.H.I.E.L.D.) in Strange Tales #135 (1965), Jones did not follow.
superhero, and Dr. Bill Foster, who would later become the superhero Black Goliath, were introduced. In the next decade, several more black superheroes would emerge at both Marvel and DC. In 1969, Marvel introduced the Falcon, the first African-American superhero, who would become the long-time partner (or, depending on your level of cynicism, long-time sidekick) of Captain America; in 1972, Marvel also introduced Power Man/Luke Cage in the company’s first solo series starring a black superhero; and in 1973, Marvel introduced the supernatural heroes Blade and Brother Voodoo. DC comics, for their part, introduced their first prominent black superhero, the Green Lantern John Stewart, in 1971; in 1977, Black Lightning became DC’s first black superhero to star in his own series.
Although all of these characters are worthy of analysis, Black Panther is an especially influential and unique character. The first black superhero and, to this day, one of the most prominent black superheroes,39 Black Panther is the only mainstream black superhero from the 1960s or 70s who is not centrally inspired by what Adilifu Nama calls the “ghettocentric clichés” (44) of Blaxploitation cinema. While these clichés, and their incorporation into the superhero genre, are certainly interesting in their own right, this chapter is primarily concerned with Black Panther’s embodiment of a separatist, utopian black futurism that is missing—or at least
comparatively muted—in stories featuring many of the Blaxploitation-inspired superheroes, few
Anna Beatrice Scott argues that although many amateur and professional comics historians have claimed that the Black Panther Party was inspired by the Marvel hero, such claims have little basis in fact. While Scott ultimately surmises that the naming was likely a coincidence, Sean Howe’s recent investigation of the issue argues that Marvel’s Black Panther may have been inspired by the Black Panther Party; Howe’s proof is that Lee and Kirby’s original design for the character called him the Coal Tiger, but this name changed following an article in the New York Times about the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, which was already using the Black Panther as its logo.
39 Black Panther has the most solo series and the most total solo issues of any black superhero. Black Panther’s
prominence and uniqueness is furthermore evinced by the fact that, since the 1970s, he has often been paired with influential black voices. Reginald Hudlin, former President of Entertainment for BET, wrote Black Panther’s solo series from 2005 to 2008; in 2016, journalistic and cultural critic Ta-Neshi Coates was the writer of a new solo series starring the Panther; and in 2018, Black Panther will star in a blockbuster feature film helmed by critically acclaimed director Ryan Coogler.
of which managed to become prominent past the 1970s (at least without significant reinvention). The long absence of black superheroes from the pages of American superhero comics is conspicuous inasmuch as the superhero genre’s defining themes of alienation and difference inherently evoke racialized experiences of passing and double consciousness. Similar to classic science fiction which, as Isiah Lavender III observes, “often talks about race by not talking about race,” the first several decades of superhero comics set their outlandish fantasies within a
“generic white space” (Lavender 7). In superhero comics, the exclusion of racial diversity is rendered additionally conspicuous via the fact that so many of the superhero genre’s most influential creators—including Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Bill Finger (co-creator of Batman), Jack Kirby, and Stan Lee—were first-generation Jewish immigrants who began writing and drawing comics amid the intense anti-Semitism that culminated in the holocaust. Despite the superhero genre’s copious images of Aryan power (see the aforementioned WWII-era images of white supermen towering over grotesque caricatures of Japanese soldiers), several recent books (see Brod, Kaplan, Fingeroth) argue that reading this Jewish context into the founding
conventions of the superhero genre can offer heretofore neglected interpretations of those conventions. The convention of the dual or secret identity is a frequent focus of these analyses. Harry Brod, for instance, argues that “Clark’s Jewish-seeming nerdiness and Superman’s non- Jewish-seeming hypermasculinity are two sides of the same coin, the accentuated Jewish male stereotype and its exaggerated stereotypical counterpart” (11). Although Superman is, in a sense, celebrated for his difference, wearing his heritage proudly on his chest and declaring his alien- ness through the spectacular display of his superpowers, Danny Fingeroth argues that Superman can also be read as representing a fantasy of ideal assimilation. Superman, Fingeroth argues, embodies “[t]he fantasy of the totally accepted immigrant, the curly, dark immigrant being taken
in by the WASP heartland itself—by the wholesome and nurturing world of the farm, which provided sustenance to the country and the world beyond—this was truly the welcome that the immigrant and the immigrant’s introverted, traumatized, fiction-dwelling son—Mitchell Siegel’s son—could only imagine and hope for” (48). Taking a similar line, Greg M. Smith offers a sympathetic reading of Superman’s whiteness when he argues that, “The secret identity… embodies the American immigrant experience of assimilation, in which the alien Other must put on a mainstream costume in order to ‘pass’ within society” (126-7). Anna Beatrice Scott offers a less sympathetic reading when she argues that the “whiteness” of “‘aliens’ like Superman is predicated on their difference of the same—they are visibly marked as white, such that their difference is subsumed, perhaps augmented by this whiteness. In this frame… the superhero… allows white men to explore Otherness publicly” (296). Though many superhero stories make both Smith and Scott’s readings available, it is nonetheless inescapably true that although Superman—as well as the Golden Age’s other prominent superheroes, such as Batman, Wonder Woman, and Captain America—evoke double consciousness, they all exploit their duality (or, more accurately, their multiplicity) more than they are truly afflicted by it, due, in large part, to the ideal/“normal” white bodies behind their glasses and within their skin-tight leotards.
As discussed in Chapter One, the initial wave of Marvel heroes did experience superheroism as an affliction as well as an advantage (a trend that Brod calls the “re- Jewification” of superheroes [86]). And yet, for the first five years of the Marvel Universe, beneath or behind even the most monstrous transformations there was always an ideal or at the very least “normal” white face. Supervillains, in contrast, are often implicitly or explicitly racialized.40 In addition, when and where the Marvel Age superheroes face persecution as
40 In addition to explicitly and exaggeratedly racialized supervillains such as Wong-Chu, supervillains such as the
minorities, these superheroes’ white faces can, as Scott argues above, render such stories appropriative. This appropriation is especially evident in the example of the original X-Men, in which the persecution of the all-white, all-American superteam as a fantastical racial minority (the “mutant race”) takes its cue from the Civil Rights movement. As Fingeroth observes, in the early X-Men comics, the conflict between the pacifist and integrationist mutant leader Charles Xavier and the aggressive and separatist mutant leader Magneto functions as an obvious (and thoroughly imperfect) analogue of the ideological conflicts between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X (121).41 The fact that it was considered acceptable to use fictional white characters to represent the experiences of real minorities speaks to the white privilege of universality—that is, the assumption that whiteness is a norm or default state that exceeds and/or encompasses all racial categories. As Richard Dyer explains, “At the level of racial representation… whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race” (3). The early X-Men’s appropriation also speaks to the tendency of America’s white majority to be interested in the political struggles of minorities only if and when those struggles are thought to directly affect them. David S. Marriott identifies this tendency in several postwar racial “problem” films. While films such as Home of the Brave (1949) were “purportedly about blacks, these films were also, as Ralph Ellison’s 1949 review in The Reporter put it, ‘not about Negroes at all; they are about what whites think and feel about negroes’” (74). The original X-Men may be read as an extreme example of this
phenomenon, in that it explicitly replaces (or displaces) black experiences and subjectivities with white faces that cannot help but evoke white desires and white perspectives.
Mariner can be read as a Japanese stand-in (84).
41 Of course, many of the X-Men franchise’s iconic storylines also explicitly reference the persecution of Jews. The
“Days of Future Past” storyline, for instance, in Uncanny X-Men #141–142 (1981), makes mutants the victims of a holocaust, and Magneto is eventually revealed as a concentration camp survivor. However, these explicit references to Jewish experience were not present in the original stories.
The introduction of Black Panther, a.k.a. T’Challa, king of the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda, in Fantastic Four #52 (1966) (Image 2) makes some efforts to address—and redress—the superhero genre’s long history of racial appropriation and exclusion. In Fantastic Four #52, the Panther sends a guide in a futuristic flying machine to invite the Fantastic Four to his secretive African homeland for a “hunt.” In the standard Marvel tradition of superhero team- ups, the Panther is a brief antagonist before uniting with the Four against a greater threat in the following issue. The Panther “hunts” the Fantastic Four only as a test of his prowess that
prepares him to defeat his true arch-enemy, a pit helmet-wearing colonial invader by the name of Klaw (Image 3), a man who is also responsible for killing the Panther’s father.
The choice to debut the first black superhero in a jungle setting risks confirming Africa as exotic or savage, locating black men and women as foreign others rather than neighbors at home. Yet Lee and Kirby are clearly aware of their participation in certain stereotypes of black
representation, and of the need to subvert these stereotypes—morally, but also in the interests of ensuring the viability of their new black superhero. As a case in point, in Fantastic Four #52 the customarily uncouth Thing repeatedly points out the similarities between Black Panther’s origin story and other generic jungle tales. When the Panther begins to relate the story of how his father, a “great chieftain,” was killed during Klaw’s invasion, the Thing yawns loudly and declares, “I saw this in a million jungle movies!” Fantastic Four #52 more prominently asserts